Stars Are Made of Hydrogen and Helium, Not Wishes
by Verdot
Summary: Hojo is tired of this high school romance bullshit. Written for an exchange thing. Dry humor, mind you, not really that funny towards the end. OGC.


Hojo was tired of feeling like he was in some stupid high school. No, he was tired of feeling like the dork in some stupid high school.

He'd been told to bring her on board because she was brilliant, dedicated, had a guilt complex regarding some poor dead sod previously employed. This meant she would be in the lab doing what she was supposed to, not... whatever it was that she was doing. Shopping? Making bad origami cranes? _A real Wutain would know that cranes didn't look like retarded albatrosses._

Was it too much to ask for a little dedication?

"Where have you been all this time?" He was beginning to find it a certain amount foolish to see that she wore dresses under the lab coat. Had she not listened in Chem 101?

"I was stargazing." He was afraid if he rolled his eyes any more that they would keep spinning in some kind of foolish lottery. _I always seem to lose the lottery anyway, if Gast is any indication._

"Your culture mutated improperly and the lab smells like corned beef now."

"A lot better than formaldehyde." Lucrecia was a smart aleck too. It wasn't obvious, but she had a sharp wit that he would admire if he wasn't beginning to dislike her habits. Like 'stargazing'. He knew what that meant, he'd been to an all boys school. Just like a 'walk in the woods' or a 'swim in the ocean'.

"Would you please fix it?"

She strode past him on those very not lab safe high heels and smirked. "As soon as Professor Gast asks me to."

One of these days he was going to get his own lab.

---

"What _is_ that?" The second most annoying thing after Lucrecia had poked his head in.

"It's my lunch. Clearly you are a meat and potato barbarian." In the end, Gast had made him clean up the experiment, as Lucrecia 'had a headache'. He wanted to make a comment about adding rubbers to the experiment budget, but Hojo had thought better of it. _Not like anyone would get the joke anyway._

"Someone spat in your ramen?" He could appreciate the sire of such a man, but Vincent Valentine was the kind to rub in the fact he was good looking, decently smart, talented, and generally liked by most people. Oh, and he had a gun.

"Aren't you supposed to be pretending you're 'protecting' Lucrecia from the invisible threats out here?" Maybe Hojo was more annoyed they'd only assigned a Turk out here for her. He could just as easily get eaten by a wandering monster, but he didn't get his own rent-a-shadow. If he did he'd request some girl that didn't look like Lucrecia at all. Maybe a blonde.

One that did foot massages.

"She's reading some books and I got tired of shooting at cans."

"Are you waiting for a song and dance on my part?"

"I've heard that you can at least do the cha-cha." Hojo was now convinced that Vincent and Lucrecia must be smart alecky siblings. _Ew, incest._

"I actually square dance." He regretted it as soon as he said it. Vincent never outright smiled, it would ruin his cool guy image. But he smirked. Oh, did he smirk.

Instead of waiting for the comeback, Hojo went off to go do something with his life. Like figure out how to keep those two from breeding. Or creating a super being to eat them. 

Actually, that wasn't half a bad idea.

---

He pitched it to Gast, who didn't like human testing at first really, but after a few interestingly laced drinks was completely on his side. Hojo didn't mess around when the muse struck. Maybe he'd been gazing into the glow of mako a little too much.

Or this was simply a revenge of the nerd.

"Lucrecia? Are you busy right now?" She turned her pretty little head around and he noticed an open astronomy journal on her lab bench. It really was a shame when a mind went to waste.

"What is it, Hojo?"

"I was wondering if you'd like to get a little more... high profile research in." Despite the skirts and the heels and the sometimes girly giggling, Lucrecia thought of herself as a feminist. As of current in Shinra, there were no accolades that had been given to a female scientist. _So do you make ambitious wishes on those stars?_

"High profile?"

"Very. You'd be a _central_ role in the next phase of research."

"What do I have to do?" There was a scientist in there after all. Once this was finished, he'd have something even better to work with.

---

Vincent proved that he wasn't a scientist at all. Or he would have figured out that Lucrecia's pregnancy wasn't from his carelessness. Though it was fun to listen in when Lucrecia broke the news. Assumptions were never something you made in science.

"Wait, how did that happen?"

"I don't know, maybe it broke?"

"Broke?"

Lucrecia knew it wasn't his, but it was better to tell the killer boyfriend he was responsible. Hojo was needed in this phase as well and she couldn't have Vincent flying off the handle about something as silly as infidelity.

Besides, she had refused to do it the old fashioned way with him anyway. _Not like I wanted you._

He wondered, though, if Lucrecia was one of those women that worried about looking fat.

But Vincent took even less well to the idea of fatherhood than either of them anticipated. Lucrecia, maybe because she was tired of the moping or the avoidances—like _he_ understood women—decided to make up some elaborate story about how she was in love with him instead. Or something.

Hojo just remembered her running up to him out of nowhere and snogging his brains out. It was fake, it was forced, but it still gave him a hard on. He was a nerd, after all.

---

"Now this is going to be a little cold..."

"Your hands are what's cold."

"Well I'm sorry I didn't warm them up for you, Highness."

_Pregnant women sucked._ It was a routine sonogram to make sure that the baby was doing alright. Hojo had read all sorts of things about cravings and other such phantom things that pregnant women went through as being psychosomatic. He'd tried to explain this to Lucrecia, but she'd taken to throwing test tubes at him instead.

He hadn't seen Vincent in a while, which gave him some sort of smug satisfaction. Even though he had been sent to watch Lucrecia, he could go back to Midgar at any time—as long as he had a replacement. His replacement was dutiful and didn't get in his way.

Hojo almost wanted to buy the man a drink for his professionalism. Maybe he would ask him how to use a gun while he was at it. He could be hip.

"God I'm like a beached whale..."

She flung the nearest object, a pitcher of water, at him when he snickered.

---

Vincent eventually returned to them, looking a little worse for wear and more pouty. Hojo had taken to smirking at him any time there was ever a chance the Turk would look at him, which caused him to be more pouty. Now he understood why the popular kid with the pretty cheerleader girlfriend always was such a prick. It was kind of fun.

And now Vincent knew what was going to happen with Lucrecia's child. He heard the pleadings mostly at night, when Lucrecia was always in her foulest of moods.

"But it's a child, it's wrong."

"Since when did you care about ethics?"

"It's just wrong, you shouldn't do this."

"You had your chance, you blew it. Now let me sleep."

It should probably be a bad thing, his level of moral flexibility. But since he'd given up that smidgeon of ethics he had, things were going just where he wanted them to. And everyone except himself was oblivious.

Hojo spun the revolver in the dark. It made such a nice sound on such a clear night.

---

"I have to stop you, Hojo."

Vincent was intoxicated. He could smell it as soon as he walked in the room. 

"Stop me from what? You'll have to be specific." Hojo had the upper hand. _Even your talent with weapons is nullified with a little alcohol._

"You can't do this to Lucrecia's child."

"You mean Lucrecia's and _my_ child? We're both adults and we're both scientists, Vincent. We have every legal right and reason."

"It's not..."

"What, you thought she would settle down for _you_?" 

When he lunged, Hojo pulled the revolver from his labcoat. It was a practiced and graceful movement, and he could see why men with guns got laid like they did. He would have to send the Turk that had shown him how to do this a fruit basket.

"Are you... going to kill me?"

"Oh no, _I_ am not going to kill you."

It was a vital truth of the universe that everything came from chaos. Whether through the ignorantly held beliefs of mystical means or some big bang, no one was sure. But one night, staring at those rebellious stars, Hojo had gotten the idea of reversing the process, so to speak.

He'd always planned on having two specimens by the end of this.

---

"Let me hold him..."

He'd certainly used Lucrecia up until this point, but he hadn't quite acted emotional or gotten spiteful yet. The child was perfect, even if he was covered in biological goo, but Hojo was used to this by now. Stars were born like this, out of clouds of almost waste--so Lucrecia's astronomy journals said.

"Maybe later." _Maybe after you die._ He was like a child looking down at an ant through a magnifying glass. He could burn her, or leave her be, but burning sounded all the more fun. So he turned a deaf ear to the sound of her vitals bottoming out.

Maybe that was a little spiteful.

"Hello little god," he said to the child later, with eyes that were the kind of green from glass jars that he would stare at when he needed inspiration, "do _you_ know all the proteins you're made of?"

Lucrecia's, and even Vincent's, fatal mistake wasn't that they had pissed him off. It was that they looked at the world and saw poetry, forgetting what it _was_. And for that, anyone with a clear mind would have destroyed them.

"There's collagen, which makes up 40 of your proteins, and..."


End file.
